


Burn Without Sound

by parcequelle



Category: Grace and Frankie (TV)
Genre: F/F, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-14 12:29:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13007805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parcequelle/pseuds/parcequelle
Summary: Here is a list of things Grace doesn't do.





	Burn Without Sound

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wonderwanda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wonderwanda/gifts).



> For wonderwanda on the occasion of Yuletide! I hope you have a lovely one! This fic was a great deal of fun to write, and I really hope you enjoy it. Thanks for requesting such a great ship!

Grace has made her peace with it, the slow distillation of suspicion into certainty that she will never have Frankie the way she wants her. There are times, late at night, alcohol plying her bloodstream with hope, when she dares to think, _Maybe_ , but then comes Santa Fe, and Frankie is gone but Frankie is not gone, Frankie’s absence pulsing through every crevice of the hyper-tidy house. It’s littered with ghostly road signs instructing Grace to take different routes, to occupy different spaces – turn left at the kitchen island instead of right; don’t sit in that chair; push that one chipped, paint-stained mug to the back, out of sight – warning her not to misstep and trip over the energy Frankie forgot.

Hours sigh into days sigh into weeks, and Grace spends them in wild vacillation between moroseness and manic productivity, between tipsiness and something more lethargic, between sleeplessness and all-nighters spent squinting at her laptop through itchy contacts. The twinge in her neck is waiting for her when she stands up in the morning, a sharp-tongued, brutally honest not-quite-friend come to remind her that she’s too old for this sort of thing.

And then, just like that, Frankie is back, hand-painted clogs and a lopsided smile that isn’t as sad as it should be and that hair, and this bright new joy is a paralytic to Grace’s throat, to her tongue. She can do nothing but crush Frankie’s laugh-vibrant body into her own, right there in the doorway, and inhale the scent that is nothing more simple or loaded than _home_. She cannot ask the questions she needs to (what about Jacob, why now, why didn’t you call me to come and collect you) or the questions she wants to (why did you put me through this month of hell, is it over now, why won’t you just kiss me) and so she doesn’t. She just pulls back, just smooths Frankie’s flyaway hair from her eyes with shaking hands and says, ‘You look like you could use a smoothie. Kale and beet, right?’ and tries to readjust to the feeling of once again having a heart in her chest, red and beating.

*

Here is a list of things Grace doesn’t do:

She doesn’t allow her eyes to linger on the up-curve of Frankie’s lips when she laughs, on their pink roundness when they curl around a joint and she inhales, lashes fluttering, like a prayer. 

She doesn’t think about how quiet it is in her bedroom without Frankie’s distinct melange of snoring and sleep-talking and sleep-martial arts, or how empty it feels to not wake up with Frankie’s arctic toes between her calves or the scent of jojoba and sandalwood on her pillow.

She doesn’t let herself wonder why Frankie came back.

*

Grace can’t freeze-frame on the moment things begin to return to normal between them, or at least the semblance of normal that is their Grace-and-Frankie life, but they do. She becomes less convinced that the charged, breathless moments that catch in the air between them can mean anything but gentle affection, and she learns to accept that the heat she sometimes sees – used to see – flickering in Frankie’s eyes, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, there-and-then-gone, is – _was_ – little more than the product of her own overworked, underpaid imagination.

There are still times when Grace can feel Frankie watching her as though she is waiting for something, waiting for Grace to remark on the elephant sharing the room with them, as though only Grace’s acknowledgment of it can draw it into the light, but she knows she isn’t. Frankie isn’t. Grace isn’t going to let herself lose control for long enough to ask.

Days sigh into weeks sigh into months, and Grace knows that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this, that she only has to search for it in the right places. She dives into psychoanalysis in search of evidence, in search of a satisfyingly rigid intellectual framework through which she can view this inconvenient, lingering sentiment. She finds some titles, reads some reviews; buys a Kindle so she can download the eBooks and read them whenever she wants, unobserved, Frankie chattering in blessed oblivion beside her. This can likely all be explained by Grace’s fraught relationship to her mother or her father or her kindergarten teacher, and she has literature that will prove it. She has reference material. Research is in her future. _Answers_ are in her future. She’ll educate herself and she’ll put things back the way they were before. Grace has always been good at that – finding things, fixing things, boxing things up and sealing them safe and tight.

Grace fixes things and she can fix this, this impossibility that is her feelings for Frankie. It isn’t supposed to be this way, she is sure; this is an error, a brain glitch, an emotional response left over from Frankie’s stroke, from Frankie moving away and then coming back, upending and then righting Grace’s life like an uncommonly merciful hurricane. Frankie is an exception, an aberration in Grace’s skittering heart and tingling fingers, in the agitated prickling beneath her skin; in the way she has to roll her eyes or sigh a long-suffering sigh to prevent Frankie’s smiling mouth from infecting her own.

How long can an aberration last?

*

Here is a list of things Grace doesn’t do:

She doesn’t wonder why, for forty long years, her business-like, love-starved marriage was enough for her.

She doesn’t turn to look when she passes pairs of girls – women – walking too closely, hands intertwined, heads bent together to shut out the world, their smiles a secret language she mustn’t yearn to learn.

She doesn’t drink half a bottle of vodka at 2am and open Google to start typing _what to do when you keep—_ (delete) or _confusing platonic feelings for—_ (delete) or _how to know if you might be—_ (delete delete delete, close it down, fling it aside, pour another drink with shaking fingers).

*

Frankie is singing a song, a song she is making up as she goes. Her voice is a low, smoke-grey lull, soothing like this rain, the first real rain they have seen in months. Grace had almost forgotten the way it tastes skimming off the sea, salty and fresh and a lot like relief, and she breathes it in, tries to suck it into her lungs, into her blood; tries to flush herself, scrub herself clean with it.

Frankie is making up words as she makes up a tune, warbling and jazzy but surprisingly sombre, surprisingly rich. The patio doors are standing wide open, the sofa turned to face them. When Frankie first suggested they start shifting furniture, Grace had feared the introduction of some culturally-appropriated thanksgiving ritual and at least partial nudity, but Frankie just wanted to sit side-by-side with Grace and watch the rain.

(‘Why aren’t you out there in it?’ Grace had asked, gesturing, thirty minutes earlier. ‘I thought you’d be all over the chance for a purification ritual.’ _After Santa Fe_ , she didn’t say, but she heard it anyway. Knows Frankie did, too.

Frankie had looked at her like maybe, like – like nothing. ‘Don’t be silly, Grace,’ she’d said, with one of those indignant-affectionate scoffs that should have been just right but wasn’t. There had been something amiss in the mathematics of Frankie’s expression, eyes and voice not adding up, something Grace couldn’t correct. ‘You can’t do a purification ritual when the moon is waning.’)

Now, Grace has a cup of tea beside her, only a little doctored. She had been reading, before the rain, and her Kindle is lying in sleep-mode, face down on her lap, as she sighs into the clamorous silence of hammering drops. Their weight increases as the rain slants sideways, winking silver against the soaked wood of the patio table, the tawny smudge of the sand beyond.

‘Yeah, baby! Come to Mama!’ Frankie whoops, executing an arguably dance-like manoeuvre that makes Grace’s cushion depress by association. ‘Grace, Grace, aren’t you excited? Can’t you feel Mother Earth singing out her joy at the gentle caress of this rain?’

As if on cue, thunder claps over the ocean, and Grace snorts. ‘Not unless she’s singing heavy metal.’

Frankie says nothing, but she reaches out and grabs Grace’s hand, mashes it against her own chest. The movement tugs Grace over the invisible barrier between them to Frankie’s region of the sofa, their thighs and biceps suddenly aligned. Somewhere in the distance, Frankie is babbling about the spiritual charge of water and geomantic lines but Grace doesn’t hear it, can’t hear it, because her ears are enclosed in seashells; humming, buzzing, too loud and too quiet, her five senses reduced to this one, to these two: this nothing-everything sound, and Frankie’s hand, still curled on her breastbone. 

If rain is a curtain, closing out the world, then a storm is a world of its own. Perhaps that is why they continue to sit there, every cell in Grace’s right thigh aware of every cell in Frankie’s left, the vulnerable space between her breasts catching on Frankie’s unmoving hand. Isn’t it hurting Frankie to have her arm stretched out like that? Grace feels a sympathetic pulse of arthritis in her own wrist just looking at it. Looking down at it, Frankie’s hand on skin-and-fabric, both a foreign entity and a part of Grace’s body, Grace’s being.

Grace turns her head to say so, to cut through the thickening tension with dryness her weapon, and finds Frankie has cut through it already, Frankie’s eyes as lucid and knowing as Grace has ever seen them, her smile a full tilt of too-wise secrecy. Frankie still hasn’t moved her hand, but now she curls her fingers, a gentle grasp at nothing, at everything, and the pads of her artist’s fingers graze the ridge of Grace’s collarbone through her blouse, activating heat.

Grace shivers, her body racing to catch up with the warmth that is Frankie’s touch, Frankie’s presence, the curve of Frankie’s smile as she notices and comprehends. Something like humiliation prickles along Grace’s skin, reflexive, before the vibration of terror-lust-hope-desperation rises to consume it and she swallows, her cheeks growing warm, and—

‘Stay with me,’ Frankie murmurs, and she cocks her head and peers up at Grace like an inquisitive chicken; Grace’s hysterical laughter catches somewhere between her heart and her throat, and she finds herself nodding. ‘Are you with me?’

‘Yes,’ Grace says, nodding still. She stops, swallows. ‘Yes.’

One hand still at Grace’s collarbone, Frankie raises her free one and brings it to Grace’s face, her eyes never leaving Grace’s, her movements slow and steady, as clearly telegraphed as if Frankie had spoken her intentions aloud. There are six seconds at most that separate the motion’s conception and its birth, but they are six seconds during which Grace’s body begins to thrum, hope rising to heat her skin, to set it vibrating with anticipation, with fierce desire that shocks her and doesn’t shock her at once. It is extreme and it is violent, but Grace Hanson has always been a woman of violent extremes, so why should this be any different?

This, Frankie. This, with Frankie. Grace’s consciousness is suspended somewhere above belief, below incredulity. Grace says, ‘Frankie.’ Her voice is lower than she expects it to be, and she swallows again; Frankie watches her do it.

Frankie says, ‘Yes.’ A statement, not a question. 

‘How long have you known?’ Grace asks. It isn’t her first question or even her most important, but it is the one that forms and holds long enough to be asked.

Frankie smiles enigmatically and says, ‘Exactly as long as I needed to,’ and Grace rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling, too. How could she help it? Frankie’s fingers are soft on her cheekbone, Frankie’s breath a warm puff at her neck, and then Frankie says, ‘I’m pretty darn astonished that we managed to have this conversation without actually saying much, and later, we’re going to have to correct that to make sure we’re on the same page, metaphorically speaking, but right now I… I really want to kiss you, Grace. On the mouth. Enthusiastically. Can I do that?’

‘I sure hope so,’ Grace murmurs. Her eyes are on Frankie’s lips, and it feels like familiar territory, like she’s spent a lot of time hanging out here and just hasn’t noticed.

‘ _May_ I do that?’ Frankie asks.

Grace smiles and says, ‘ _Yes_.’

*

Here is a list of things Grace doesn’t do:

She doesn’t stop being appalled by Frankie’s eating and smoking habits, or the lipstick drawings that appear on her bathroom mirror with worrying frequency, or the fact that her bedroom now smells like the illegitimate offspring of marijuana and sage.

She doesn’t stop complaining about crumbs in her sheets or the indentation of the TV remote on her thigh or Frankie’s sleep-debates with Rush Limbaugh.

She doesn’t bother to kick Frankie out of bed.


End file.
